The paper provides a framework for analysis of remuneration to agents whose task is to make well-informed decisions on behalf of a principal, with managers in large corporations as the most prominent example. The principal and agent initially bargain over the pay scheme to the latter. The...

This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents' relative preference for private versus public good consumption. I show how private good consumption should be coordinated...

In a repeated unobserved endowment economy in which agents negotiate long-term contracts with a financial intermediary, we study the implications of the interaction between incentive compatibility and participation constraints for risk sharing. In particular, we assume that after a default...

This paper proposes a simple analysis for examining an agent's optimal decisions in a principal-agency problem. Unlike the standard approach, the target firm's expected return and risk are modeled as a parametric curve in terms of a critical business decision. A general condition is derived for...

A principal incentivizes a team of agents to work by privately offering them bonuses contingent on team success. We study the principal's optimal incentive scheme that implements work as a unique equilibrium. This scheme leverages rank uncertainty to address strategic uncertainty. Each agent is...

I study optimal financial contracting when neither cash flows nor the risk profile of project choices are verifiable. Using a contracting framework, I show the resulting two frictions (cash-diversion and asset-substitution) are intricately linked: to address the cash-diversion problem, an...

We develop a theory of “risky utilities”, i.e. private firms that manage an infrastructure for public service, and that may be tempted to engage in excessively risky activities, such as reducing maintenance expenditures (at the risk of provoking a break-down of the system) or in speculation...

An issuer, privately informed about the distribution of the project's cash flows, raises financing from an uninformed investor through a security sale. The investor faces Knightian uncertainty about the distribution of cash flows and evaluates each security by the worst-case distribution at...

We study a buyer's optimal investment strategy for new technologies when costs evolve stochastically and are private information to the suppliers. In a continuous time setting, we show how the asymmetric information on the stochastic variables leads to delays in investment compared to the real...

Diversification through a financial intermediary has the benefit of transforming loans that need costly monitoring into bank deposits that do not. We show, however, that financial intermediation in a costly state verification model has a cost not yet analyzed: it allows for the existence of...